tk8500 - Computer Control Software for
the ICOM IC-R8500 Receiver

Copyright 2004, Bob Parnass

Overview

tk8500
is open
source software designed to control and program the
ICOM
IC-R8500 receiver.
An introductory article about
this software appeared in April 2002
Monitoring Times magazine.
tk8500 was favorably reviewed by Peter Bond in
Britain's
Short Wave Magazine, November 2002.

Though tk8500 is intended chiefly for Linux, MacOS X, and BSD
users, it will work on Microsoft Windows (95 and later), too.

tk8500
is distributed free of charge,
but it is neither shareware nor in the public domain.
tk8500
is a copyrighted work released under the terms of the
GNU General Public License
as published by the
Free Software Foundation.tk8500
is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
See the
GNU General Public License
for more details.

You can only scan one bank
at a time while operating the IC-R8500 using the radio's
front panel controls.
tk8500 lets you scan multiple
memory channel banks.
You can designate a special volume setting
to be used when receiving selected frequencies (no sound
card required).
The louder audio can
alert you to signals on important frequencies while
scanning or can compensate for undermodulated transmitters.

tk8500
can be used to load the IC-R8500 memories or read memory
data from the radio and store it in a file.
Channels may be sorted by frequency or by label, within any
bank or all banks.

Data files are in csv (comma-separated values) format,
so users can create or edit them using spreadsheet or text editor programs.

tk8500
software provides a facility to log and timestamp
active frequencies and relative signal strengths
to a log file in csv format.
For example: